The Coming of the War

How had it come to this? In 1912, another Ivy League college professor and former president of Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson, had become president of the United States. He was a conservative Democrat and a racist advocate of segregation who had a progressive domestic economic agenda, most famously his support for and signing of the Revenue Act of 1913 that established the income tax. After World War I had broken out in August of 1914 in Europe, Wilson ran for his second term on the slogans “He Kept Us Out of War” and “America First,” won the election, and took office in 1916.

A month later, however, Wilson broke off relations with Germany, claiming he wanted no conflict, but it was clear he intended for the United States to join the Entente (England, France, Russia, Italy, and Japan) and fight the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria). In response, the Socialist Party of America (SPA), which at that time had over 80,000 members, and whose presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, received almost one million votes in 1916, issued a powerful denunciation of Wilson, opposing US entry into the war.

The war, in fact, was not popular with the American people, especially its immigrant and racial minority populations. Those of German or Austrian descent, then America’s biggest immigrant group, didn’t want to fight their countrymen. People of Irish descent rejected the idea of an alliance with Great Britain, the nation that had oppressed them for three hundred years. Russians and other Eastern Europeans, among them the Jews, wanted nothing to do with the Tsarist empire, then still in power, which they had fled. Although liberal figures like the young W. E. B. Du Bois supported the war effort, encouraging African Americans to “close ranks” and forget their “special grievances”, many black people and Native Americans had little enthusiasm for fighting for a government that denied them their rights.

Opposition grew with the adoption of the Selective Service Act, or Draft Act, of 1917, granting the government the power to raise a national army through conscription. Many Americans from the Midwest to the South opposed conscription as a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery or involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime.

Columbia Before the War and After

In the period before the United States entered the war, Columbia had an exciting intellectual atmosphere created in large measure by its progressive professors. The Columbia historian James Harvey Robinson argued for the importance of intellectual freedom and for a more popular and relevant approach to his discipline. E. R. A. Seligman, a professor of economics at the university, while an opponent of socialism, advocated the economic interpretation of history and called for a progressive income tax. And Charles Beard was most famous for his 1913 book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States in which he argued that the US Constitution had been written by an economic elite to protect its own financial interests. While none of these men were radicals, their progressive ideas encouraged debate about the nature of the US government and the American ruling class.

In the lead-up to the war, the Columbia Socialist Club and Columbia’s Anti-Militarism League and their members invited antiwar speakers to campus. The student activists gave speeches, published newspapers, and distributed leaflets opposing the war. This gradually turned the university into a hotbed of antiwar sentiment — but it also worried university management and political elites.

Columbia Goes to War

Like Woodrow Wilson, Columbia’s president Nicholas Butler, along with the other management staff, of the university were also preparing for war. In May of 1916, the university held a mass meeting where faculty and students pledged support for “war preparedness.” Urged on by Columbia’s administration, some five hundred students and alumni traveled to Plattsburg, New York, that summer for military training. When in February 1917, Wilson severed relations with Germany, so too did Columbia, which formed its own national defense committee and established a Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). Faculty members signed petitions condemning Germany’s treatment of the Belgians and called upon Wilson to enter the war.

On April 2, 1917, Wilson heeded these requests and persuaded Congress to take the United States into war. As the United States entered the war, Butler made Columbia an integral part of the war machine. He announced that “anyone who acts, speaks, or writes treason” would be expelled from the university. At that time, new courses on “war issues” were created; Columbia enrolled 1,400 students in ROTC, and eventually 300 went on to officer training. Columbia enrolled the entire student body in the Student Army Trains Corps and placed it under military discipline, with morning reveille and roll call and military calisthenics, and insisted on the wearing of military uniforms.

To build up support for the war, Butler arranged for Marshal Joseph Joffre, commander in chief of the French forces, and former French prime minister René Viviani to visit Columbia, where they received honorary degrees before an audience of 20,000. By the war’s close, 8,700 Columbia students, faculty, staff, and alumni had served in World War I, and at least two hundred were killed.

As Columbia prepared for war, the university’s students organized to oppose it. When the national draft registration day was announced as June 5, 1917, the response of the Columbia students was to advocate resistance to conscription. In the days leading up to registration, they published a leaflet titled “Will You Be Drafted?” urging those eligible for the draft to refuse, and distributed their flyer in New York City.

Secret Service agents arrested Columbia students Charles Francis Phillip and Owen Cattell as well as Eleanor Parker of Barnard, Columbia’s women’s college, on June 1,1917, for distributing an anti-conscription leaflet in what may have been the first case brought against the war’s anti-draft activists. They were charged with a conspiracy to obstruct the military laws of the United States.

The government’s case against Cattell and Phillips was based on a paragraph of their leaflet in which they advised men of draft age to resist registration, even though they might go to jail. To avoid prison time, the defendants argued preposterously that they had planned to change those paragraphs before distributing the pamphlet.

The two were defended by Socialist Party lawyer Morris Hillquit who argued, equally unbelievably, that their pamphlet “was not intended for general circulation, but was only for conscientious objectors and members of the Collegiate Anti-Conscription League.” The New York Times reported that Hillquit told the jury that the defendants were neither unpatriotic or un-American but rather enthusiastic young idealists. “Happy is the nation,” he added, “that has such young people who now and then preach the gospel of peace.” The prosecuting attorney pointed out that Phillips had refused to register for the draft until persuaded by his father.

The next day the jury found the two men guilty, but the judge fined them only $500 each and sentenced Phillips to just six days and Cattell only to one day in the Tombs jail.

The Case of Charles Francis Phillips

Released from jail, Phillips had a series of experiences much like those of other draft resisters at the time. In February of 1918, he received a notice to report for military duty but decided to ignore it. The Draft Board notified the press, and Phillips explained to the newspapers his intention to defy the order. Within a few days, the police arrested him and delivered him to Camp Upton at Yaphank, Long Island. There he was pushed through a physical examination, forcibly dressed in a uniform, and when he refused to participate in military exercises was punched and kicked by the drill sergeant.

After a second day of mistreatment and beatings, Phillips was transferred to a conscientious objector barracks with several Quakers, religious fundamentalists, and two other socialists. He stayed there until March 3, 1918, when, seeing that he was intransigent, the camp commandant, General Johnston, had Phillips dishonorably discharged from the military as a convicted felon, based on Phillips’s conviction of conspiracy for his anti-draft activities.

Phillips’s discharge became headlines in the New York City papers that very afternoon, for Phillips seemed to have found a way to successfully dodge the draft. Defying conscription, he became a felon, and being a felon, he was then ineligible for the draft.

While he had apparently escaped both the army and prison, Phillips could not escape notoriety. Poison-pen letters, critical newspaper articles, and condemnatory editorials followed him everywhere he went. On March 4, 1918, Phillips received a letter signed J. R. King that called him “a felon, a criminal, a loafer, a slacker, a pacifist and everything else that could make a miserable dirty cur.” The writer went on, “You are one of the vilest, most degenerate creatures on the face of the Earth, and are not fit for dogs to associate with. Damn your Rotten Soul.” One day Phillips came home to find a note on his door that read: “You dirty looking cur at this very corner before many months is [sic] gone you will get a damned good bullet put through your rotten heart you are a danger to the country you rotten anarchist.”

At the time, war resisters were being beaten, tarred and feathered, and in a few instances murdered, so Phillips could not regard these notes as idle threats. The New York Times, adopting the position of a cheerleader for war it has reprised during Israel’s assault on Gaza, published an editorial that took aim at Phillips. Titled “Martyrdom Won Far Too Easily,” the article expressed its indignation that Phillips had not only “defied the Government and escaped the draft, but he has revealed to all of like mind the way to do the same thing and attain the same distinction among their fellows.” The editorial suggested the US government authorities were planning to draft Phillips again and send him back to the camp — and this time, if he refused to cooperate, to subject him to military trial and punishment.

The draft evaders and resisters, now nearly universally derided as “slackers,” were ridiculed, threatened, and sometimes attacked. Nevertheless, Phillips continued to organize resistance to the war and the draft. The Collegiate Anti-Militarism League having died, Phillips, with the help of the pacifist leader Rebecca Shelley, put together a new organization called Young Democracy. The Socialist Party’s Rand School provided him with a national mailing list, and Phillips was back in business.

The new organization planned an antiwar convention to be held on May 4 and May 5 at the Mountain House in Valhalla, New York, but the Post Office Department declared the notices of the convention “unmailable,” and the Justice Department put the movement under surveillance. Again The New York Times took up the issue, in an April 12 editorial titled “His Triumph Gives Him Courage,” noting Phillips’s return to antiwar activism, suggesting that he had made a mockery of the authorities and insisting that something should be done about it.

The Slackers Flee to Mexico

Fearing that he would be redrafted and sent to a military camp, or perhaps that some overzealous patriot would attempt to kill him, Phillips and his now wife, Eleanor Parker, deliberated with their confidants, Owen Cattell, his father James Cattell, and a few other friends. At the suggestion of James Cattell, Charles and Eleanor decided that if it seemed Charles would be redrafted, then they would flee to Mexico. Owen Cattell also decided to go to Mexico, though separately.

The couple did not have to wait long. A few days later, on April 15, the newspapers reported that the War Department had criticized General Johnston’s discharge of Phillips. At the beginning of May, Secretary of War Ray Stannard Baker announced that Phillips would be redrafted. Charles Phillips and Eleanor Parker left at once for Mexico, joining some 10,000 war resisters and draft dodgers who had fled to the south.

There was a mass migration of young men and sometimes their women friends or gay boyfriends to Mexico to escape the rising repression in the United States. The Wilson administration and state governments were arresting and imprisoning members of the Socialist Party and of the revolutionary syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). State and local police were joined by American legionnaires to beat up those and other leftists and to destroy their offices and printing presses. Selective Service agents joined by the American Legion and other patriotic organizations carried out roundups of young men in the cities, demanding to see their draft cards and turning them into the authorities if they were delinquent.

The socialist war resisters continued to flee to Mexico. Herman P. Levine, who had also studied at Columbia University, and had joined the Socialist Party become a schoolteacher in Brooklyn, had a series of experiences much like Phillips. In May of 1917, he refused to register, was arrested, forcibly registered for the draft, convicted, and imprisoned for a year. When he got out of jail, he fled to Mexico. There he met up with comrades in Tampico, then the center of the Mexican oil industry and a hotbed of militant labor organizing, and worked with the IWW organizing petroleum workers.

Out in California, Carleton Beals, who had studied at UC Berkeley, refused to register, was arrested by the Berkeley police for failure to register, then released, then arrested again for desertion and held in the Presidio prison. There the company commander, who didn’t want a conscientious objector on his base, had Beals examined and discharged on February 11, 1918, with the Selective Service classification 5-G as totally and permanently unfit for military service. Beals felt he might yet be drafted again, and his brother Ralph was still eligible for the draft, so the two drove to Mexico. Beals became a leftist journalist in Mexico, writing for the Nation, the New Republic, and the Socialist Party’s paper the Call.

The Fight for Free Speech Continues at Columbia

Meanwhile, back in New York at Columbia University, the fight continued over the right to speak out against the war. In March of 1917, Butler and the Columbia trustees began to investigate the university’s professors to see if they were engaged in treasonous activities.

In October, six months after the United States entered World War I, the trustees fired professors James McKeen Cattell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana for antiwar activities. Both were accused of encouraging disloyalty to the government of the United States. How exactly? Cattell had urged Congress to exempt conscientious objectors from military service, while Dana was involved in the People’s Council, a pacifist organization leading the antiwar movement.

To protest the firing of his colleagues, the university’s most famous and popular professor at the time, Charles A. Beard, resigned. Standing weeping before his students, he explained to them he was quitting. Beard, who did not oppose US entry into the war, supported the right of others to disagree, a sign of how extreme the criminalization of dissent had gotten. In his letter of resignation Beard wrote:

a group of willful and obscure trustees, men who have no standing in education . . . who are reactionary and voiceless in politics, narrow and Medieval in religion, dominated the university and terrorized the young instructors. America, of all countries, has made the status of the professor lower than that of the manual laborer who, through his union, has at least some voice in the terms and conditions of his employment.

He went on:

But we cannot whip the minority of people who do not agree with the war by curses or bludgeoning. . . . If these were ordinary times one might more readily ignore the unhappy position in which the Board of Trustees has placed the teachers. But these are no ordinary times. We are in the midst of an era which will call for all the emancipated thinking that Americans can command.

A Committee of Nine, made up of members of the University Council, was formed to both appeal for Beard to reconsider his resignation and to further cooperation between the faculty and the trustees. Students held a mass meeting on Columbia library steps on October 17, and the following day they produced a resolution asking Beard to return to campus.

But Beard was done with Columbia. While he could no longer teach, Beard and his wife Mary Ritter Beard, two of the great historians of the Progressive Era, wrote a series of histories of the United States that sold in the millions of copies.

Down in Mexico, the slackers — they had taken on the epithet as a badge of honor — joined together to strengthen the Industrial Workers of the World, which already existed there, and joined with members of the Socialist Party of Mexico to found the Communist Party of Mexico, while their women friends worked with Mexican women to also organize a Feminist Council. Columbia’s repression of the antiwar movement had contributed to the students’ radicalization and turned some of them into longtime revolutionary activists.